AERA & CHAT

This was my first AERA. While there, I learned that AERA has a SIG interested in Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). This simple fact has already been beneficial to me and given me several insights for my dissertation. My time at AERA was very well spent and I can't wait to go back.

The first session I attended was a collection of three paper presentations focusing on Activity Theory. The first, by Dr. Robert Bracewell, was theoretical in nature. The other two were applications - one by a linguist who found CHAT to be powerfully explanatory regarding the work he was doing and the other - a teacher in a Korean preschool located in Montreal who was studying language acquisition. All were useful with insights for more reading and ideas for representing my work (multiple triangles!) All three presenters are from McGill University in Canada.

I also attended the CHAT SIG business meeting and learned (lucky me!) that there had been three cancellations for a Thursday afternoon mini-course on CHAT. I gleefully paid my fee and got one of those now vacant seats. The workshop format was interesting. The SIG chair had arranged for 8 AT faculty to work with groups. I joined the "self-identified novices" group and spent a couple of hours talking about our projects and getting some of my specific questions answered.

I had been struggling to identify the "unit of analysis" (an important idea in CHAT) and was able to run my "almost coherent" thoughts past Natalja - one of the profs working with my group. Turns out I had the right ideas, just lacked the language to talk about them in a way that made sense. It took her about 30 seconds to give me the terms I needed to speak about this - along with a citation to add to my reading list. Of course, now that I have it, it sounds so easy. I just need to move things back and forth between the "foreground" and "background" as a write about and talk about the system. This concept allows the mediational aspect that is placed in the background to contine to influence the system, even though it is not the main interest for the moment. I like the fact that it's not "separated" or "deconstructed".

As I've been reading about the CHAT framework, I've been rather overwhelmed by the rich background in Soviet Psychology. What a relief it was when Stanton (the other professor) said "You don't need to read all of that to understand CHAT - just read Mike Cole's book, Cultural Psychology. It will tell you everything you need to know." It's a 400 page book, but much easier than reading 100 books translated from Russian to English!

Folks mentioned the XMCA mailing list at both the business meeting and at the mini-course. I had found it in one of my Google searches and didn't realize it is open to the public. It has a several important names listed as members and I didn't know they would accept rookies on the list. It turns out they welcome rookies with open arms. The mailing list is quite active. I spent about an hour reading the April postings and have already signed up. I had wanted to ask faculty at the mini-course to suggest a dissertation to serve as an exemplar of the theory and methodology, but we simply ran out of time. If I don't find something like that in the mailing list archives, I will ask that in my first posting to the list as I introduce myself.